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Adam Darmanin

Senior Director | Former Blackrock | Quant | AI

About Me

Senior engineering director with 20 years of experience. I'm a Technologist at heart and work as a Principal, AI, and Financial Engineer. If agile is your cup of tea, I was the founder of Scrumday Malta and still maintain affiliations and networks, which I offer on request. I was a technical Co-Founder and CTO in an AI Start-Up in YCombinator's 2019 list, called ProdX.AI. I was the managing partner of the Technology Advisory Call For Atlas. I now run the Quantitative Research Partnership: Hecatus Research, where we use algo-trading, our researched models and signals to trade our portfolios.

Jurisdiction

Germany | Italy | France | Spain | Austria | Hungary | Malta | Gibraltar

Notable Employer

  • Senior Director at Blackrock
  • Manager Saas Portfolio at Trilogy

Experience

Seniority LevelExecutive
Years of Experience20+ years
Current StatusActive
Founder and Practice LeadHecatus Research
2024 - Present

Independent applied AI and quantitative research practice delivering production platforms for asset management, private markets, and regulated digital businesses. Built and operated a systematic investment platform under private mandate, spanning 187 data sources, 7GB+ daily ingestion, factor research, backtesting, portfolio construction, risk, and model governance. Designed CTA and multi-factor strategies across equities and futures, with approximately $1.3B in modeled capacity and $12M in live capital. Delivered a governed agentic due-diligence and research platform for an investment firm. Served as embedded Head of AI for a digital-asset business, building an agentic operating system across product, payments, risk, compliance, and operations. Core stack: Python, Dask, Polars, MLflow, SageMaker, AWS Glue, Bedrock, LangGraph, LangFuse, RAGFlow, n8n, Docker, dbt, TimescaleDB, and CUDA.

Senior DirectorNotableBlackrock
2021 - 2024

Led a core Quant platform (Snowflake, Airflow, Dask) running 13K+ models across ~$300B+ AUM; scaled a large disrupted engineering organization across 6 global offices. Drove AI/ML adoption across portfolio management, research, and operations; championed NLP and GenAI initiatives across EMEA. Contributed to AladdinAsk and LLM/agent engineering initiatives. Tech: Machine Learning, AI, Financial Engineering, Investment Models, Azure, Dynamics 365, API Graph, SRE, Hadoop, Spark, Dask, Python, Prefect, Airflow, Snowflake, Java Spring Cloud, Scaled Agile, Scrum@Scale, LLMs, Agentic Systems Industry: Asset Management

Manager Saas PortfolioNotableTrilogy
2018 - 2021

Led post-acquisition technical transformation of multiple SaaS businesses, re-architecting platforms and reorganizing engineering/product teams into fully automated, cloud-native, remote-first units within 120 days. Rebuilt infrastructure for high availability and low OPEX while sustaining 99.99% uptime. Built and managed large engineering organizations across 7 time zones and 4 business units. Directed the R&D partnership with Diffblue (Cambridge AI) to automate QA across 3B+ lines of Java, returning ~$5M/year in engineering capacity. Industry: Private Equity, SaaS

CTO Co-FounderProdX.ai
2018 - 2020

Co-founded an AI-driven workforce management platform targeting the pre-COVID remote-teams market; built toward a $7M ARR opportunity, raised $130K seed, and wound down operations in 2021. Architected a lean multi-cloud platform leveraging AWS (Lambda, Cognito, Amplify, IoT Core) and GCP to run and scale ML workloads, enabling rapid experimentation and business pivots. Leveraged the Y Combinator network to accelerate product iteration, infrastructure design, and go-to-market validation, and partnered with H20.ai for autoML solutions. Industry: AI, SaaS, Workforce Management Tech: AWS, GCP, H2O.ai, Machine Learning, Unsupervised Learning, IoT, Electron

Head of Engineering & CTOWowcat
2016 - 2018

Built and led the founding organization of 20; Delivered a novel mobile betting platform, advancing to a Hard Rock licensing deal with an estimated $3M ARR potential. Achieved full Malta Gaming Authority (MGA) and GDPR compliance. Industry: Mobile Gaming Platforms, iGaming Tech: AWS, Java (Spring), Kotlin, PHP, Kafka, ELK, MongoDB, Unity

Education

Degree of InformaticsUniversity of Malta
2003 - 2007
Masters of Artificial IntelligenceUniversity of Malta
2023 - 2025
Masters of Financial EngineeringWorld Quant University
2025 - Present

Certification

Total Certifications7

Foundations of Financial Engineering

WorldQuant University

2026

Credential ID: 7XF8E9EFE6AU

Advanced Learning Algorithms

Stanford University

2023

Credential ID: 7XF8E9EFE6AU

Supervised Machine Learning Specialization

Stanford University

2023

Credential ID: 7ZG9RJ4D84P9

Microsoft Certified: Azure Developer Associate

Microsoft

2022

Credential ID: I347-4319

Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals

Microsoft

2022

Credential ID: I304-2784

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate

AWS

2021

Credential ID: PF1DVLHLLFR4QDKX

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

AWS

2020

Credential ID: FJRHNKHD1F441M3G

Skills

Core skills10
Interests8
Languages3

Skills

Quantitative Finance
Algorithmic Trading
Machine Learning
Generative AI
Agentic AI Systems
Data Engineering
MLOps
Python
AI Product Strategy
Technology Strategy

Interests

Systematic Investing
Financial Markets
AI Agents
Applied AI Research
Asset Management
Financial Technology
AI Governance
Decision Intelligence

Languages

English
Italian
Spanish